DARK AGES AMERICA

This is the Blog for MORRIS BERMAN, the author of "Dark Ages America". It includes current publications and random thoughts about U.S. Foreign Policy, including letters and reactions to publications from others.
A cultural historian and social critic, MORRIS BERMAN is the author of "Wandering God" and "The Twilight of American Culture". Since 2003 he has been a visiting professor in sociology at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
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September 29, 2013

A Million Hits

Dear Wafers:
Well, we did it. They said it couldn’t be done, but we did it. This blog began in April 2006, and between then and today more there have been more than a million views. It seems hard to believe. Consider:
-When we declared the US was going down the tubes, everyone laughed.
-When we argued that Obama wasn’t any different from Bush Jr., except that he could speak English, they laughed even harder.
-When we pointed out that America was, and always had been, about hustling, and therefore had no moral center and thus no future, they spluttered and raged.
-When we predicted that Occupy Wall Street had no coherent ideology or organization, no staying power, and that “the 99%” really just wanted to get into “the 1%”; and (to make matters worse) that the American population literally didn’t have the gray matter to pull off any kind of positive social change, they raged even further. Many rolled around on the floor, foaming at the mouth.
-When we scored technology as the hidden religion of the United States, and thus a bogus form of progress, they became apoplectic, and massaged their cell phones just to calm down.
-And yet, all of these things, in addition to additional arguments put forward on this blog by myself and other Wafers, proved, in the fullness of time, to be true. Obama turned out to be a war criminal and a shill for the Pentagon, Wall Street, and the corporations. His administration has energetically gone after whistleblowers, and has murdered US citizens or indefinitely detained them under the cover of the fascistic National Defense Authorization Act. Instead of doing anything positive to change the direction of the country, the American people are staring into their iPads and smart phones, totally mesmerized and moronized by the latest electronic gadget. Books documenting their ignorance and stupidity have multiplied rapidly since 2006. Our educational system is a joke, our cities lie in shambles, and our political discourse is totally vapid. Hustling proceeds with incredible vigor and determination, and “Me, myself, and I” is the purpose of life for most Americans (polls reveal that empathy is basically out the window). The president’s absurd failure in Syria, and comeuppance from Vladimir Putin, has left him, and America, with egg on face. Much of the rest of the world perceives us (correctly) as not “exceptional” at all, but rather weak and ineffectual. Nearly 20% of the nation is unemployed, with no prospects of future work—and so on. Our star is fading, and in the pattern of late-phase empires, we are committing suicide by our own hand (denial being a big part of the process). Some call it karma; I call it “history.”
I know my fellow countrymen are still raging, but I have the distinct feeling that they are no longer laughing.
On to the next million!
-mb

About Me

Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University. During 1982-88 he was the Lansdowne Professor in the History of Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Berman won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, the Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992, and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity (from the Media Ecology Association) in 2013. He is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness–-The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000)–and in 2000 his Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review. Dr. Berman relocated to Mexico in 2006, and during 2008-9 was a Visiting Professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City.